Grass: Gottfried Keller’s Structural Realism Frauke Berndt University of Zurich Abstract: In Gottfried Keller’s novel Der grüne Heinrich (1854-55), the “green places” are where vegetation grows in particular abundance� Narrative sequences in which such places are described can be related to the concept of structural realism, which has been put forward as a way of understanding several authors in the age of realism� To this end, I begin by introducing the relevant positions in research on realism, distinguishing between reality and that particular world realized in narrative fiction� I then reconstruct several aspects of vegetation, particularly grass, as a motif with highest self-reflexive potential both in the visual arts and literature of premodernity, before analyzing two narrative sequences from Keller’s novel� It is my claim that Keller does not represent reality, but rather that the ontological structure of the world realized in the novel becomes manifest in both a concrete (cemetery) and an abstract form (drawing)� Keywords: Gottfried Keller, Der grüne Heinrich, realism, ontology, form Realism loves nature, realism loves close-ups of reality, and realism loves detail� Narrative sequences where nature is described in detail are of prominent epistemological relevance� It is in them that we can deepen our understanding of complex literary-theoretical problems� The age of realism has undergone a renaissance in scholarly interest in recent years� 1 It is high time for it� There can hardly be any other period that is conceived of so heterogeneously� The term “realism” was suggested by nineteenth-century authors who sought to distance themselves from the periods of romanticism and Weimar classicism, and particularly from Goethe’s shadow� In literary studies, the term has been qualified in various ways, depending on the interest in any given case: as bürgerlich (to stress the economic background to the period), programmatic (to take into account contemporary manifestos), poetic (to elaborate on literary traditions, 422 Frauke Berndt particularly in genre history), literary (to investigate dimensions of fictionality vs� reality), aesthetic (to address processes of allegorization and symbolization), figural (to point out rhetorical techniques of representation), complex (to emphasize the problems of these representations), and structural (to analyze the frameworks and rules of creating fictional worlds)� Matters are not helped by the fact that “realism” is, on top of all this, also one of the central terms of philosophy, one with which nothing less than the relationship between humans and reality, subject and object, has been debated for more than two millennia� This unfortunate coincidence of authorial self-description and philosophical problems has led into the cul-de-sac in which research on realism now finds itself� The way out of this depends on turning around in a way that itself depends on making a categorial distinction between reality and the world realized in narrative fiction� I will outline the foundations for this in what follows� Erich Auerbach’s study of the problem of Mimesis (1945) was already concerned not with reality but - as the subtitle announces - with The Representation of Reality in Western Literature� In his book, he turns, among other things, to French naturalism, specifically to the novel Germinie Lacerteux (1864) by the brothers Edmund and Jules de Goncourt� The poetics of the Goncourts’ novel calls for the common people and every object, however plain it may be, in the life of the so-called fourth estate to be taken into account� It is directed against the great, supposedly elitist realists Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert� Auerbach’s stipulation is that a realistic representation has to “embrace the whole reality of contemporary civilization” (497)� This depends, he argues, on the polyphony of the novel� With this argument, he shifts attention from narrative to scenic sequences, in which the rhetorical figure of fictio personae is used� Auerbach considers “the extreme in mixture of styles” to be a “method[] of experimental biology” in which the “work of the novelist” becomes “scientific work” (496)� The fact that literary theory is based on the dramatic, not the narrative mode of the novel confirms the extent of the problem that is marked by the concept of mimesis: in effect, only a representation of speech can be a representation of reality, because only it can end up being true to reality� After all, this is why “mimesis” in rhetoric refers merely to the imitation of a person’s speech (Quintilian 9�2�58)� Mikhail Bakhtin puts forward a similar argument in his essay “Discourse in the Novel” (1934-35), which also notes style mixing in, among others, Dostoevsky: “The novel as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice” (261)� The shift from reality to representation continued to establish itself in literary theory, though research on realism has to this day been reluctant to embrace it and is unable to give up the search for essentialistic concepts of realism� Roman Jakobson developed an approach concerned not with the dramatic but with Grass: Gottfried Keller’s Structural Realism 423 the narrative mode of the novel in his essay “On Realism in Art” (1921)� The starting point for his argument lies in the observation that there is hardly any other concept in art and literary history that has been used to push such a wide range of agendas� He thinks that the potential of the term “realism” lies not in the represented content but in the means of representation, thereby redirecting the philosophical question of reality and, closely connected to that, its truth to the rhetorical question of the “concept of verisimilitude in art” ( Jakobson 21), or, with regard to the novel: the verisimilitude of the world realized in narrative fiction� Verisimilitude does not presuppose reality� A represented world is considered verisimilar even if it is not true but could be true� At this point we find ourselves dealing with questions of fiction theory that have been pursued above all by Cornelia Pierstorff in her research on Wilhelm Raabe’s narrative prose, where she outlines an ontological narratology� 2 The rhetoricity that Jakobson observed in nineteenth-century literature is presented by Roland Barthes in his famous essay on “L’Effet de Réel” (1968), in which he considers the effect of rhetorical figures of detail (amplificatio)� Here, he draws attention to “unessential details” ( Jakobson 25) in the description of things: Semiotically, the “concrete detail” is constituted by the direct collusion of a referent and a signifier; the signified is expelled from the sign, and with it, of course, the possibility of developing a form of the signified, i�e�, narrative structure itself� (Realistic literature is narrative, of course, but that is because its realism is only fragmentary, erratic, confined to “details,” and because the most realistic narrative imaginable develops along unrealistic lines�) (Barthes 147, emphasis in original) This explains the “preference for highly selective snapshots of reality” in the whole period (Ort 17), 3 covering people and outdoor spaces (“nature”) as well as indoor spaces, in particular their decor, as Claus-Michael Ort has observed� Yet it is not only the details in and of themselves but also the metonymic “condensation of the narrative” ( Jakobson 25, emphasis in original) with the goal of bringing “out a new feature, the newly improvised epithet” (26) that generates such “reality effects�” These effects are supported by the “consistent motivation and justification” of actions and events ( Jakobson 27)� In the same year as Barthes, in his theory of cultural semiotics in Languages of Art (1968), Nelson Goodman teases out the general, culturally determined rules for “reality effects”: “Realism is relative, determined by the system of representation standard for a given culture or person at a given time” (37)� Although his reference medium is images rather than texts, Goodman’s ideas lead seamlessly to the means of representation in realistic literature, which can be reframed praxeologically with his words: “practice has rendered the symbols so transparent that we are 424 Frauke Berndt not aware of any effort, of any alternatives, or of making any interpretation at all” (Goodman 36)� It is by the path of historicization that Hans Blumenberg, finally, also approaches the problem of realism� He focuses not on the concept of realism, however, but on its opponents� At the Gießen “Imitation and Illusion” colloquium in 1963, he presented his ideas on “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel” (Blumenberg 29)� “World” - that is what Blumenberg calls the structure with which he redirects the modern concept of reality and binds it to the genre laws of the novel: “This is the starting point from which modern literature - and the esthetics appropriate to it - proceed towards the novel as the most comprehensively ‘realistic’ genre, representing a context which, though finite in itself, presumes and indicates infinity” (Blumenberg 42)� It is the genre in which art can claim “not merely to represent objects of the world, or even to imitate the world, but to actualize a world” (39, emphasis in original)� The problem of realism thus presents itself in a new light in Blumenberg: the ontological structure of such a world as that realized in the novel is the measuring post for the structure of reality, and not the other way round� This is why realism is concerned not with reality but with the specific “forms of the world,” as Eric Downing aptly puts it (19)� It is in this sense that Stephan Kammer and Karin Krauthausen make the case for structural realism: The literary program of the bürgerlich or artistic realism of the nineteenth century may indeed address structures and bring this into play in opposition to being limited to mirroring, reproducing, or replicating […] but in the process it addresses not the structures underpinning historical realities but the metaphysical principles ordering them� (34) 4 In my own research, I advocate the thesis that realism does not represent reality but rather that in literature or art, the ontological structure of the world realized in any given case has to become manifest in one or the other form� 5 With this, the turn is complete: it is now possible to make a categorial distinction between reality and the world realized in narrative fiction� In order to explore the distinction between reality and the world realized in narrative fiction, such a realistic everyday detail as vegetation, particularly grass, may serve as the starting point for my argumentation� “[T]iefstufe der idg. basis * ghrē: * ghrō: ghrə ‘wachsen, grünen’” notes the dictionary of the brothers Grimm under the entry for Gras, referring to a herbaceous plant� 6 The word can refer both to every individual plant belonging to the different types of grass on the one hand and to the covering of the ground in general on the other� And here lies the basis of the problem� Following Jacques Lacan, in what follows I dis- Grass: Gottfried Keller’s Structural Realism 425 tinguish three functions that grass can have in the world realized in narrative fiction: symbolic, imaginary, and real; however, the symbolic function in this context is not to be confused with the concept of the symbol in the metaphysics of art around 1800� I have chosen Lacan’s triad not because I am interested in its psychoanalytical aspects but because it presents semiotic categories that can be put to use in a theory of structural realism� This is due not least to the origins of the categories themselves, for Lacan imports his concept of the symbolic from structuralist linguistics, of the imaginary from philosophical aesthetics, and of the real from phenomenology� In his triad, the symbolic is “perhaps the dominant element insofar as the imaginary is symbolically transfigured and the real is linked to the symbolic” (Kammer 643)� 7 Equated with language, the signifier or the “phallus,” the symbolic has the function of constituting meaning� “The symbolic does not, however, institutionalize a stable symbolic order; instead, it combines order with disorder in a paradoxical structure both inside the Oedipal triangle and in the spheres of political and legal power (law) or economy - in the ‘name of the father’ (nom-du-père)” (Kammer 643)� 8 The imaginary, on the other hand, creates the “realm of images with which the ego identifies” (Tonger- Erk 626)� 9 The real, finally, is not just merely what is left after the imaginary and the symbolic, even though it is incomprehensible, unthinkable, impossible, and above all unsayable� Instead, Lacan defines the real (which is anything but realistic in the commonly accepted sense) as something that eludes symbolization (and imagination), indeed as something that represents a resistance to the symbolic and, to a certain extent, a cut in the symbolic (Berndt 2017, 638)� Consequently, “grass” as a general term for what covers the ground is symbolic; the images, scenes, and narratives that might be stimulated by glancing at the grass are imaginary; and every single blade of grass is as mere phenomenon real, as long as it does not tend to an image or a fixed meaning� In its tendency to a destructive potential, the real has that structure that becomes manifest in repetition, compulsion, dreams, trauma, or the uncanny� Lacan assigns the real to sexuality and death� In the most recent scholarship, the real plays a decisive role, 10 captured by Elisabeth Strowick as follows: “The real with which realism is concerned is the real” (11, emphasis in original)� 11 426 Frauke Berndt Fig� 1: Giovanni Bellini: St. Francis in the Desert (1480)� The Frick Collection, New York� That details of vegetation in narrative fiction, particularly grass, are significant for the problem of realism can be seen from the fascinating history of the motif, which I would like to outline with a small selection of examples� Giovanni Bellini painted St� Francis (fig� 1) not only under vine leaves but also surrounded by rocks with plants, including some blades of grass, sprouting out of them� The world realized in this painting is based on the tension between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, for these pieces of vegetation in the arrangement of the painting are neither imaginary nor symbolic� 12 As paradoxical as it inevitably sounds, the absolutely meaningless and useless growth represents the real� Bellini deals with this theologically by granting every last piece of vegetation its fixed position in the divine order� This cosmology represents the symbolic in the painting: God, Father, truth� At the center, though, stands the saint himself, presented absorbed in contemplation; indeed, the painting is sometimes called St. Francis in Ecstasy� Ascetic practices can be learnt and trained in pursuit of a very special level of attentiveness that precisely does not lead into imaginary Grass: Gottfried Keller’s Structural Realism 427 identification with images (there are many other examples of this in the visual arts)� The saint’s posture - in ecstasy - is thus thoroughly ambiguous: on the one hand, one can view it as a guarantee of the divine order; on the other, he is training a poise that leads from Christian asceticism to aesthetic experience and so to something that I would like to call, with Martin Seel, the affirmation of “phenomenal individuality” (28, emphasis in original)� The saint thereby functions, to a certain extent, as a role model: he is training a contemplative attentiveness to an object, even to the single blades of grass� This is the point at which the exercises of spiritual contemplation find a use that is, to some extent, new and modern� It is about training the aesthetic mode of experience� And that which is aesthetically experienced is the real� Fig� 2: Albrecht Dürer: The Great Piece of Turf (1503)� The Albertina Museum, Vienna� 428 Frauke Berndt In The Great Piece of Turf (fig� 2), Albrecht Dürer also stages the tensions between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real� The world realized in this watercolor immediately confronts the viewer with grass and other plants, but, unlike Bellini, without counterbalancing this confrontation metaphysically� The viewer now has three possibilities for viewing the watercolor� First, she can step back and use the title that Dürer provided: she sees a large piece of turf, that is, she applies the general term “turf” to what she sees� Second, she can start to dream about figures and shapes that she imagines in the vegetation� Or, third, she can step closer to the watercolor and become absorbed in the single blades of grass - for so long and so intensely that she no longer sees anything at all that she could distinguish conceptually� Precisely this would be an aesthetic experience that would demand the affirmation of phenomenal individuality, which is an affirmation of the real� It is precisely this tension between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real that distinguishes the world realized in the nine volumes of Barthold Heinrich Brockes’s Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott, bestehend in Physicalisch- und Moralischen Gedichten (1721-48), in which everything in the world can be interpreted as a sign of God, imagined as something else or affirmed in its phenomenal individuality� And this very tension is staged time and again in the self-reflexive poems of the collection - as in the musically structured “Das Gras, im Anfange des Frühlings” (Brockes 14)� At first glance, the alternation of ariosos and arias runs like the well-oiled engine of an allegory linking grass as a phenomenon, the imagination of spring, and the symbolic order of creation� The theological meaning of the physical grass is expressed in Psalm 104, in a passage that Brockes places between the piece’s title and the songs: “HERR, du lässest Gras wachsen für das Vieh” (14)� In Brockes’s usual manner, a singer praises the “Wunder-Pracht” (14) of the awakening spring and celebrates it as a mystic marriage between Mother Earth and her husband, Light� At first, the symbolic dominates over the imaginary and the real in this allegory, in which the expression “Gras” appears primarily as a general term for the ground cover through the use of a series of related expressions: “Fläche” - “Grün” - “Matten” - “Kraut” - “Klee” - and so on� The usual praise of God follows at the end in an aria, this time quoting Psalm 111: ARIA� Auf, ihr Sterblichen, betrachtet, Schauet GOttes Wunder an! Schmeckt die Liebe, fühlt die Stärcke! Ruffet: Groß sind Deine Wercke! Grass: Gottfried Keller’s Structural Realism 429 Wer Ihr achtet, Der hat eitel Lust daran� Ps� CXI, 2� (Brockes 19) In Brockes’s world every blade of grass has its safe position in the divine order� The macrocosm is reflected in the microcosm, without any apparent threat to the prestabilized harmony� Yet scholars have repeatedly pointed out that Brockes’s Irdisches Vergnügen is not just theological but also remarkably attuned to the development of modern aesthetic discourse� The singer reflects this with the use of “Überfluss,” which Sebastian Meixner describes in the present issue as a defining factor in the economy of realism� 13 Überfluss, of course, is at the same time one of the central concepts of the modern aesthetics that Brockes, in parallel to the philosophical foundation provided by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, explores in his cycle of poems� 14 At the center stands the singer, who sings himself into a rapture comparable to that of the saint in Bellini’s painting� In this way, he reaches a state of over-attentive contemplation that likewise does not lead into any imaginary identification with images, for the song breaks out of the theological, indeed even the logical frame� In the poem, the real penetrates the symbolic order several times, without taking form in the imaginary� With the aesthetic concept of Überfluss, it becomes clear that Brockes does not represent reality but rather that the ontological structure of the world realized in the poem becomes manifest in the singer’s ecstatic perception� Überfluss is introduced by how the general green of the grass, which the singer praises, gives way to a whole spectrum of colors in perception� Brockes here draws on the one hand on Isaac Newton’s theory of light; on the other, he relies on the rhetorical figures of detail (amplificatio) that form the ontological structure� In his meditative immersion in the green of the grass, the singer experiences a veritable flash of green that makes both symbolic abstraction and imaginary dreaming impossible� This becomes clear from the fact that the poem - in the tradition of negative theology (Kazmaier 21-57) - presents each of its images in negative terms, such that no image can be brought into focus and the visual impressions merge together: Die Farbe scheinet zwar, von weitem, allgemein Und einerley zu seyn; Doch, da auf jedes Blatt das Licht verändert strahlet, Wird jenes auch dadurch absonderlich gemahlet� Bey vielen siehet man, auf den gebog’nen Spitzen, Im glatten Wiederschein, ein gläntzend Lichtgen blitzen� Durch viele, die durchsichtig, strahl’t und bricht 430 Frauke Berndt Ein durch ihr zartes Grün gemildert, gelblichs Licht, So, daß kein Chrysolith so grünlich-gelb, so rein, Als die durchsichtigen bestrahlten Spitzen seyn� Die niedrigsten, wenn jene sie verdunckeln, (Wodurch sie jener Glantz noch mehr erhöh’n) Sieht man nicht minder schön Im schattichten vertieften Grünen funckeln; Wodurch Saft- Celadon- May- Gras- und dunckel-Grün, Hier einzeln, dort verknüpft, die Augen auf sich ziehn� Ja dieß verschiedne Grün, das Aug und Herz erfrischet, Ist so verwunderlich, so angenehm gemischet, Daß man Smaragd und Chrysolith So Strahlenreich kaum gläntzend sieht; Und dieser, durch die Fern’ und Luft vereinte, Glantz Zeugt aus so manchem Theil ein unvergleichlichs Gantz� (Brockes 16) Shades of green for which names can hardly be found and which give rise to catachrestic indulgences (“Saft- Celadon- May- Gras- und dunckel-Grün”) alternate with negative comparisons with precious stones (“Chrysolith,” “Smaragd”)� Thus, the spectrum of green appears in dazzling brilliance� The couplet rhyme of the final two alexandrines in the above verses ensures that the ecstasy does not run out of control; as it turns out, they conjure the metaphysical “Gantz” out of the “Glantz”, even though a metaphoric-paradigmatic closure is out of the question here given the metonymic-syntagmatic representation� 15 The real in its Überfluss undermines the symbolic and the imaginary in equal measure� Even these twenty-two lines list so many details that it is impossible to visualize the grass - the eye is literally blinded by the beauty of the grass� And it is precisely this phenomenon, which corresponds to the real, that is associated with the concept of beauty in the poem� As in Bellini, then, so too in Brockes we are dealing with how the spiritual exercise of contemplation flips into aesthetic experience� As if Johann Wolfgang Goethe had known Dürer’s painting and Brockes’s lyric poetry (which, of course, he did), he stages just such an aesthetic experience in his Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) by placing his sensitive protagonist Werther “im hohen Grase am fallenden Bache” (352)� In his letter of 10 May, Werther writes: wenn ich das Wimmeln der kleinen Welt zwischen Halmen, die unzähligen, unergründlichen Gestalten der Würmchen, der Mückchen, näher an meinem Herzen fühle, und fühle die Gegenwart des Allmächtigen der uns nach seinem Bilde schuf, das Wehen des Alliebenden, der uns in ewiger Wonne schwebend trägt und erhält-[…]� (Goethe 352) Grass: Gottfried Keller’s Structural Realism 431 Like in Brockes, the ontological structure of the world realized in the diary novel becomes manifest in this small world between the blades of grass, which is formed by rhetorical figures of detail (amplificatio) - particularly the figure of listing (enumeratio)� Werther cannot endure the bustle between the blades of grass - the overwhelming real� But he does not start fantasizing or daydreaming; instead, he immediately allegorizes his impression cosmologically� As in Brockes, the microcosm reflects the macrocosm, and both testify to the greatness and goodness of God in the divine order� This very tension between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real plays an important role in modern aesthetic theory: in Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (1750/ 58), the category of aesthetic abundance (ubertas aesthetica) plays a major role for the structure of sensate cognition (sections VIII-XIV), and Immanuel Kant defines the aesthetic idea as “that representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i�e�, concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible” (§ 49, 192)� Contrary to Kant’s subjective aesthetics, Baumgarten is interested less in art than in the structure of the world realized in art� Its ontological structure of abundance is analyzed by means of the same categories from the rhetorical canon of style as sensate cognition, i�e�, figures of detail (amplificatio) (Berndt, Facing Poetry 41-48)� Metaphysically, however, abundance has to do not with logical order but with aesthetic disorder, to which Goethe applies the attribute “divine�” Walt Whitman most likely never read Brockes� Perhaps he read Goethe� But we can be sure that, when he chose the title for his magnum opus, Leaves of Grass, privately published in 1855, he had no idea of what his Swiss fellow-writer Gottfried Keller was up to in Munich, Heidelberg, Berlin, and Zurich� The poems (originally twelve) proliferated in the years that followed; in the ninth edition of 1892, the year of Whitman’s death, the anthology included almost four hundred poems and cycles� For his part, Keller read neither Whitman nor Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, who wrote a poem called “Im Grase” in 1848� But in the cities, he clearly remembered the grass of the meadows of his homeland well enough: time and again in his narrative fiction, the motif becomes relevant� Furthermore, Keller is sure to have registered the fact that Gras acquired the status of a model concept in the period’s image of itself, for instance as early as 1848, when Theodor Fontane described realism as a “frisch[e] grün[e] Weide” (8), to which Friedrich Theodor Vischer gave socio-political connotations some years later in 1857: “Ein zweites Mittel ist die Aufsuchung der grünen Stellen mitten in der eingetretenen Prosa, sei es der Zeit nach (Revolutionszustände u�s�w�), sei es dem Unterschiede der Stände, Lebensstellungen nach (Adel, herumzie- 432 Frauke Berndt hende Künstler, Zigeuner, Räuber u� dergl�)” (Vischer 1305)� The “green places,” however, are a way not only into the movements of the time but also, above all, into structural realism, as I will show in what follows� This is because details of vegetation, particularly grass, play a prominent role in Keller’s narrative fiction, for instance in “Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe,” whose aesthetic realism Dorothea von Mücke describes in the present issue� 16 His work is packed with nature descriptions where grass thrives in the field of tension between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real� It is not by chance that Keller begins his review of Jeremias Gotthelf’s two-volume novel Uli der Knecht: Ein Volksbuch (1846) and Uli der Pächter (1849) with a quotation from “Frau Professorin” (1846), the eleventh of Berthold Auerbach’s Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten: Die Verlobten gingen miteinander über die Wiese, da raufte Reinhard jene Pflanzen aus, und zeigte Lorle den wundersam zierlichen Bau des Zittergrases und die feinen Verhältnisse der Glockenblume; “Das gehört zu dem Schönsten was man sehen kann”, schloß er seine lange Erklärung� “Das ist eben Gras”, erwiderte Lorle, und Reinhard schrie sie heftig an: “Wie du nur so was Dummes sagen kannst, nachdem ich schon eine Viertelstunde in dich hineinrede�” (HKKA 15: 67) Keller asks whether this narrative sequence is characteristic of Dorfgeschichten-Literatur as a whole (15: 67) - the literature in which idyllic villages and landscapes provide the backdrop for undemanding plots, as is common not just in short narratives but also in novels in nineteenth-century literature� An object of sentimental obsession for the intellectuals, grass for country people is simply grass - useful as animal feed in particular, but certainly not something that might need explanation, let alone be beautiful� What Auerbach presents, of course, is precisely this conflict between the real and the symbolic� In this scene, too, the rhetorical figures of detail - particularly that of listing (enumeratio) - switch from reality to the world realized in this narrative� Reinhard turns to the grass in over-attentive contemplation - a state that leads into his aesthetic judgment that grass is among the most beautiful things one can see� In contrast to Brockes and Goethe, the real is no longer bound to a character’s perspective; at the same time, the imaginary no longer has a role to play� The prosaic response of his fiancée, “Das ist eben Gras,” seems silly to him: the beautiful cannot just be put in the archive of concepts, cannot just be accommodated under a general term for the ground cover; instead, it tends to abundance� Precisely this tension between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real is significant in Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich; it forms the ontological structure of the world that the novel Grass: Gottfried Keller’s Structural Realism 433 realizes� And the ontological structure of this world is, metaphysically speaking, beautiful� In Der grüne Heinrich, details of vegetation stand in a field of tension between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic� In the first version of the novel (the first volume was published in 1854, the fourth in 1855), the way into the story is not a direct one� Instead, an extradiegetic-heterodiegetic voice (“narrator”) presents the narrative act as an act of world-making by distinguishing this world from reality� As in Auerbach, crossing this ontological boundary marks the metaphysical concept of the beautiful: Zu den Schönsten vor Allen in der Schweiz gehören diejenigen Städte, welche an einem See und an einem Flusse zugleich liegen, so, daß sie wie ein weites Thor am Ende des See’s unmittelbar den Fluß aufnehmen, welcher mitten durch sie hin in das Land hinauszieht� […] So haben Luzern oder Genf ähnliche und doch wieder ganz eigene Reize ihrer Lage an See und Fluß� Die Zahl dieser Städte aber um eine eingebildete zu vermehren, um in diese, wie in einen Blumenscherben, das grüne Reis einer Dichtung zu pflanzen, möchte thunlich sein: indem man durch das angeführte, bestehende Beispiel das Gefühl der Wirklichkeit gewonnen hat, bleibt hinwieder dem Bedürfnisse der Phantasie größerer Spielraum und alles Mißdeuten wird verhütet� (11: 15-17) 17 In this narrative sequence, the symbolic dominates over the imaginary (and no real is in sight yet)� Imagination and phantasy produce an “eingebildete Stadt,” which evokes a “Gefühl der Wirklichkeit�” Yet the local color includes the appearance of the Swiss Council, such that the story of the aspiring artist Heinrich Lee is narrated against the background of the Swiss Republic and, so to speak, in the name of the father (nom-du-père)� It is in this context that Heinrich’s memories of his childhood and youth are presented: the “grüne Reis einer Dichtung” (11: 17) is not only beautiful but also has its material counterpart within the novel - a small book manuscript containing the story of his youth, which is titled “Jugendgeschichte” (11: 64)� It will have been part of the content of a suitcase that also contained some other books, a broken flute, a damaged skull with which he planned to give his future chamber an erudite appearance, a ruler, a paintbox, and a big, heavy portfolio “ganz mit Zeichnungen, Kupferstichen und altem Papierwerk angefüllt” (11: 25)� 434 Frauke Berndt Fig� 3: David Bailly: Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols (1651)� Museum de Lakenhal, Leiden� It is readily apparent that the items listed by Keller recall the arrangement of a classical vanitas allegory showing an artist’s studio, of the kind that has been passed down in countless variations from the seventeenth century onward� David Bailly, for instance, positions his own self-portrait (fig� 3) between items similar to those that accompany the book of Heinrich’s “Jugendgeschichte,” narrated by an intradiegetic-homodiegetic voice� This story of Heinrich’s youth is coded with transitoriness in the context of Christian salvation history and evokes memento mori� It is not just the luggage but Heinrich’s departure as a whole that stands in the sign of Christology� In the “disguised symbolism” that Erwin Panofsky (141) identified in the still-life, Heinrich becomes a postfiguration of Christ� Before he leaves Switzerland to train as an artist in the German capital, his mother provides him with twelve disciples, here concealed in the symbolic form of twelve linen shirts that are to be found alongside the other items in his case (Berndt, Anamnesis 205)� The vanitas allegory, of course, does not end with what we see inside the suitcase; instead, the allegory unfolds its semantic potential at the moment when Heinrich takes the book out of the case, opens it, and reads his “Jugendgeschichte” once again� It begins in a cemetery: Grass: Gottfried Keller’s Structural Realism 435 Der kleine Gottesacker, welcher sich rings an die trotz ihres Alters immer schneeweiß geputzte Kirche schmiegt und niemals erweitert worden ist, besteht in seiner Erde buchstäblich aus den aufgelösten Gebeinen der vorübergegangenen Geschlechter, es ist unmöglich, daß bis zur Tiefe von zehn Fuß ein Körnlein sei, welches nicht seine Wanderung durch den menschlichen Organismus gemacht und einst die übrige Erde mit umgraben geholfen hat� […] Es wächst auch das grünste Gras darauf, und die Rosen nebst dem Jasmin wuchern in göttlicher Unordnung und Ueberfülle, so daß nicht einzelne Stäudlein auf ein frisches Grab gesetzt, sondern das Grab muß in den Blumenwald hineingehauen werden, und nur der Todtengräber kennt genau die Gränze in diesem Wirrsal, wo das frisch umzugrabende Gebiet anfängt� (11: 64-65) In the form of tangled vegetation, the real now invades the symbolic, that is, the ordered burial places� Basically, this passage is a mise en scène of the tension between the real and the symbolic� Like the concept of Überfluss in Brockes, the self-reflexive reference to the “Überfülle” marks the world realized in Heinrich’s “Jugendgeschichte,” whose ontological structure becomes manifest in the place of the cemetery� Überfülle is formed by the rhetorical figures of detail (amplificatio), which include epithets (epitheta), descriptions (descriptiones), and lists (enumerationes)� The affirmation of phenomenal individuality - the affirmation of the real - goes hand-in-hand with this attention to detail� Contrary to Brockes and Goethe, this attention, however, is not bound to a character’s perspective here� Instead, it characterizes the narrative mode of the novel� Since Keller, however, stages this invasion as a vanitas still-life, one could eventually say that the real is brought to a standstill, or deadened, in the symbolic� The fact that the book manuscript can be associated with a picture of an artist’s studio emphasizes the significance of this arrangement, whereby what is real tends always to be converted into the symbolic - and, in the best case, as quickly as possible so that it cannot, as something real, unfold its destructive power� That the ontological structure of abundance presents itself in the symbolic form of an explicative allegory - the vanitas allegory - is due to the fact that the real cannot be conveyed in any other way except symbolically; with the proviso that I am using the concepts of allegory and symbol in a specific way here: symbolic for the principle, allegorical for the means of representation� We are, therefore, emphatically not dealing with an unmediated production of abundance here but rather with an allegory of the real that is guided by the concept of “Wirrsal�” The generic allusion to the forest (silva) - here as the forest of flowers in the rhetorical ornatus - rounds off the allegorical setting, which is thereby self-reflexive to the highest possible degree� This vanitas allegory binds the “Jugendgeschichte” with the frame action� This bildungsroman itself is cyclically structured: it begins at the cemetery and 436 Frauke Berndt leads back to the cemetery� And what unfolds at the grave at the end of the novel is once again the tension between the real and the symbolic� For grass grows rampantly in this symbolic setting� The fact that the real as such cannot provide a way of accessing bourgeois life that does justice to it - that, therefore, the affirmation of phenomenal individuality leads Heinrich not into the Swiss Republic, as the bildungsroman genre requires, but rather back to the starting point of the novel in the cemetery - underscores the boundary between the symbolic and the real that Keller envisages in his novel: So ging denn der todte grüne Heinrich auch den Weg hinauf in den alten Kirchhof, wo sein Vater und seine Mutter lagen� Es war ein schöner freundlicher Sommerabend, als man ihn mit Verwunderung und Theilnahme begrub, und es ist auf seinem Grabe ein recht frisches und grünes Gras gewachsen� (12: 470) In addition, the fact that in the first version of the novel, Heinrich dies because he arrives too late, after his mother’s funeral, confirms the semantics of the real, which time and again tends to the images of the imaginary� In the “Jugendgeschichte,” the real is given a female, or even chthonic-maternal coding by being connected with the death and sexuality that shape the images of the female figures Anna and Judith� The two famous kiss scenes of the “Jugendgeschichte” 18 thus interact semantically with the cemetery at the beginning of the Jugendgeschichte and at the end of the novel� It is through the female figures that the “green places” of action are implicitly related to the beautiful� It is at the cemetery that Heinrich and Anna kiss for the first time: Wir gingen zwischen den Gräbern umher, für dasjenige der Großmutter einen Strauß zu sammeln, und geriethen dabei, im tiefen thauigen Grase wandelnd, in die verworrenen Schatten der üppigen Grabgesträuche� […] Ich fragte: Was? und sie sagte, sie wolle mir jetzt den Kuß geben, den sie mir von jenem Abend her schuldig sei� Ich hatte mich schon zu ihr geneigt und wir küßten uns-zwei oder drei Mal, aber höchst ungeschickt, wir schämten uns, eilten zum Grabe, Anna warf die Blumenlast darauf hin, wir fielen uns um den Hals und küßten uns eine Viertelstunde lang unaufhörlich, zuletzt ganz vollendet und schulgerecht� (11: 304) Although Anna combines a whole series of symbols of Marian iconography, her image is ambiguous and from the outset associated with death� 19 Heinrich courts Anna by the bed of his dying grandmother, kisses her at her grave, and a series of death symbols (including poppies) mark Anna as living dead� At the end of the “Jugendgeschichte,” she finds the place where she belongs as an image - in a coffin where her beautiful corpse can be observed through a pane of glass: Grass: Gottfried Keller’s Structural Realism 437 Ich habe seither erfahren, daß Kupferstiche oder Zeichnungen, welche lange, lange Jahre hinter einem Glase ungestört liegen, während der dunklen Nächte dieser Jahre sich dem Glase mittheilen und gleichsam ihr dauerndes Spiegelbild in demselben zurücklassen� Ich ahnte jetzt auch etwas dergleichen, als ich die fromme Schraffirung altdeutscher Kupferstecherei und in dem Bilde die Art Van Eyck’scher Engel entdeckte� (12: 94) The connection of the real with images of death and sexuality is further strengthened by Anna’s counterpart, Judith� Whereas Anna’s demonic side is put to rest in death, the threat posed by Judith forms the imaginary epicenter of the “Jugendgeschichte�” The beheading of Holofernes, described in the Old Testament apocrypha, was an omnipresent subject matter in the visual arts in the nineteenth century� Keller wrote about one of the many interpretations of the theme in a letter to Johann Salomon Hegi of 6 March 1841: Eine Judith von Riedel in Rom war da, vom König angekauft� Ich habe noch nichts so schön Gemaltes gesehen; es ist vollkommen in jeder Beziehung� Die Wirkung der Beleuchtung wahrhaft magisch� Die Stoffe aufs herrlichste gezeichnet und behandelt� Es ist eine Figur in Lebensgröße, Kniestück, wie sie aufs Schwert gestützt dasteht, vom Kopf des Holofernes sieht man nur die Haare, was nach meiner Ansicht sehr gut ist� (GB 1: 185-186) The young Heinrich is unsettled by the economically self-sufficient widow Judith� There are thus rich iconographical allusions to the chthonic-maternal goddesses that are reflected in his sight of Judith naked� She leaves the water as Venus Anadyomene, “gleich einem über lebensgroßen alten Marmorbilde” (12: 81-82)� The tall and beautiful Judith creates fear and panic - if not to say, with Freud, fear of castration - in Heinrich when she takes him “beim Kopfe […] und ihn auf ihren Schooß preßte” (11: 279)� The end of the “Jugendgeschichte” thus has her leave for America, at a safe distance, from where in the second version of the novel (1879 - 80) she returns after ten years - but not for a happy ending� Instead, Judith’s ambiguity is put to rest without fulfillment in the twenty-year “Bund” between her and Heinrich� In the kiss scene, Heinrich perceives her not as an image of the garden goddess Aphrodite in the wet grass but, with a basket filled with apples, as an image of Pomona, the goddess of orchard fruit whose realm includes Vertumnus and the mown grass in Ovid (Ovid, Met� 14: 642-647): Sie hatte ihr Kleid des nassen Grases wegen etwas aufgeschürzt und zeigte die schönsten Füße; ihr Haar war von Feuchte schwer und das Gesicht von der Herbstluft mit reinem Purpur geröthet� So kam sie gerade auf mich zu, auf ihren Korb blickend, sah mich plötzlich, stellte erst erbleichend den Korb zur Erde und eilte dann mit den Zeichen der herzlichsten und aufrichtigsten Freude auf mich zu, fiel mir um den Hals und drückte mir ein Dutzend voll und rein ausgeprägte Küsse auf die Lippen� Ich hatte Mühe, dies nicht zu erwiedern und rang mich endlich von ihrer Brust los� (12: 45) 438 Frauke Berndt In the field of tension between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, the ontological structure of the world realized in the novel becomes manifest in the “green places” of the cemetery and the two gardens, which are not explicitly but implicitly related to the beautiful through the female figures� Thereby, the real is being connected with death and sexuality� But grass is not only associated with the images of the female figures but also plays a crucial role in relation to Heinrich’s artistic activity in the novel� What is important for me is that references to grass here are no longer accompanied by proliferation, disorder, and abundance� Instead, the expression “Gras” is used as a general term, as in the following passage: “Aber immer kehrte ich zu jenen großen Landschaften zurück, verfolgte den Sonnenschein, welcher durch Gras und Laub spielte, und prägte mir voll inniger Sympathie die schönen Wolkenbilder ein, welche von Glücklichen mit leichter und spielender Hand hingethürmt schienen” (11: 309)� The passage shows that, for his art, Heinrich seeks refuge in general terms: “Gras” and “Laub�” There is nothing real here, only the symbolic and, of course, the imaginary, namely the cloud images that those more fortunate seemed to have painted playfully and with a light touch� Winfried Menninghaus drew attention to the clouds and their metonymic interaction with the female figures of the novel (14-60)� Yet such images are only a dream - a narcissistic pause that momentarily suspends the tension between the symbolic and the real� For this reason, the connection of grass with death remains persistent, for example when Heinrich’s training as an artist is described as a hell: Die Jugendjahre von wohl Dreißigen solcher Knaben und Jünglinge hatte Habersaat schon in blauen Sonntagshimmeln und grasgrünen Bäumen auf sein Papier gehaucht, und der hüstelnde Kupferstecher war sein infernalischer Helfershelfer, indem er mit seinem Scheidewasser die schwarze Unterlage dazu ätzte, wobei die melancholischen Drucker, an das knarrende Rad gefesselt, füglich eine Art gedrückter Unterteufel vorstellten, nimmermüde Dämonen, die unter der Walze ihrer Pressen die zu bemalenden Blätter unerschöpflich, endlos hervorzogen� (11: 312) At first glance, details of vegetation, particularly grass - the individual phenomena, that is to say - no longer have a role to play in the context of art here� But if one looks more closely, an interesting variation on the motif can be seen, one that shifts the ontological structure of Überfluss from the concrete to the abstract, because proliferating vegetation passes its structure on to art� This shift can be observed in the scene showing Heinrich the aspiring painter at work: in contrast to what landscape painting requires of him, Heinrich does not paint objectively but scribbles around on the paper� Like the cemetery, so too Heinrich’s magnum opus is characterized by the concept of Wirrsal� The “kolossal[e] Kritzelei” (12: 221) that results does not reproduce anything; instead, it arises Grass: Gottfried Keller’s Structural Realism 439 out of a material technique: 20 before a pen - which in this instance is cut from reed - is used for drawing, it needs to be tried out on paper with some random strokes to make the ink flow, “um die Feder zu proben” (12: 220)� These strokes of the “Schilffeder” (12: 220) are entirely meaningless, are shaped by chance, and they serve neither the imaginary nor the symbolic� Instead, their form is the result of nothing more than the materials, i�e�, pen, paper, and ink� The infinite web that appears in the scribble is thus a direct “reality effect”: Unter den großen Schildereien ragte besonders ein wenigstens acht Fuß langer und entsprechend hoher Rahmen hervor, mit grauem Papiere bespannt, der auf einer mächtigen Staffelei im vollen Lichte stand� Am Fuße desselben war mit Kohle ein Vordergrund angefangen und einige Föhrenstämme, mit zwei leichten Strichen angegeben, stiegen in die Höhe� Davon war Einiges bereits mit der Schilffeder markirt, dann schien die Arbeit stehen geblieben� […] An eine gedankenlose Kritzelei, welche Heinrich in einer Ecke angebracht, um die Feder zu proben, hatte sich nach und nach ein unendliches Gewebe von Federstrichen angesetzt, welches er jeden Tag und fast jede Stunde in zerstreutem Hinbrüten weiter spann, so daß es nun den größten Theil des Rahmens bedeckte� (12: 220) Fig� 4: Thomas van Apshoven: Art Studio with the Painter David Teniers (1651)� Kunstmuseum St� Gallen� Donation of the Chappuis-Speiser family 1995� 440 Frauke Berndt Yet even on this occasion, the real cannot be directly represented; instead, the narrator returns to the vanitas allegory from the start of the novel� Heinrich’s easel fits seamlessly into such a setting, as a glance at the studio painted by Thomas van Apshoven (fig� 4) shows� Whereas the reading of the “Jugendgeschichte” stands at the center of the earlier allegory, to which it belongs as a book, this later allegory includes both the narrator’s description (ekphrasis) and ironic praise from the painter Erikson� Both quote physical and mental symptoms of melancholy that have been part of modern cultural discourse since Aristotle’s famous Problema XXX�1� These include melancholic idleness, a distracted soul, a careful and clever character, and a dreaming consciousness, for all of which knots and the labyrinth traditionally serve as symbols (Berndt, Anamnesis 172)� Betrachtete man das Wirrsal noch genauer, so entdeckte man den bewunderungswerthesten Zusammenhang, den löblichsten Fleiß darin, indem es in Einem fortgesetzten Zuge von Federstrichen und Krümmungen, welche vielleicht Tausende von Ellen ausmachten, ein Labyrinth bildete, das vom Anfangspunkte bis zum Ende zu verfolgen war� […] Nur hier und da zeigten sich kleinere oder größere Stockungen, gewissermaßen Verknotungen in diesen Irrgängen einer zerstreuten, gramseligen Seele, und die sorgsame und kluge Art, wie sich die Federspitze aus der Verlegenheit zu ziehen gesucht, bewies deutlich, daß das träumende Bewußtsein Heinrich’s aus irgend einer Patsche hinauszukommen suchte� (12: 220-221) The connection of the pen as technical device with the mental state of the artist forms the center of this second vanitas allegory, which is, like the first, an allegory for the real� It is important here to be aware that the Swiss idiom gramselig (pronounced with short a and unstressed e) should not be confused with the Standard German gramselig (long a and long e)� Heinrich’s soul is not filled with Gram, “sorrow,” but full of the jitters� In the Grimms’ dictionary, the ambiguity of the word is explained etymologically with a reference to this very passage in Keller’s novel: 2) ‘gramvoll, trübselig’, der jüngeren bedeutung von gram, m. entsprechend; nur in jungem und hier vereinzeltem gebrauch: nur hier und da zeigten sich (an einer federzeichnung) kleinere oder gröszere stockungen, gewisse verknotungen in den irrgängen meiner zerstreuten gramseligen seele G� Keller ges. w. (1889) 2, 263 (oder nicht hierher, sondern adjektivbildung zu gramseln, vb. [s.-d.] im sinne von ‘kribbelig. unruhig’? )� 21 The question with which the entry ends points to the entirely different meaning of the verb gramselen; the Schweizerisches Idiotikon underlines the material aspect of the word, which leads directly to Heinrich’s melancholic creation: Grass: Gottfried Keller’s Structural Realism 441 1� wimmeln, krabbeln, bes� von Insekten, wie Ameisen, Läusen u�-ä�; dann die entsprechende Empfindung auf der Haut: prickeln, jucken, z�- B� von einem ‘entschlafenen’ Gliede, bei Schauder, Frost usw� […] Auch etwa: in den Haaren kratzen […]; unpers� wurmen, ärgern� […] 2� zsraffen […] bes� Laub, Reisignadeln, Moos und Erde mit Rechen im Walde zsscharren (gew� auf unerlaubte Weise)� 22 From “zusammenraffen” and “zusammenscharren” it is only a short metonymic way to kritzeln and the noise that the pen makes when it is being tried out on paper� Even here, therefore, Heinrich’s art is in the service neither of the symbolic nor the imaginary, but in the service of the real� The painter Erikson categorically excludes the two other functions of art in his ironic praise� The narrator has already compared Heinrich’s scribble to a “Spinnennetz” (12: 220), and Erikson refers to it in his speech as a “Gruselei” (12: 223) and “verflucht[e] Spinnwebe” (12: 225)� Thus, Erikson puts a stop to the aesthetic experience of the person present in the studio by saying not to add some additional strokes that would connect Heinrich’s scribble to the branches of the pine trees and thereby stabilize the image symbolically in the form of a gigantic spider’s web: In diesem reformatorischen Versuch liegt noch immer ein Thema vor, welches an Etwas erinnert, auch wirst Du nicht umhin können, um dem herrlichen Gewebe einen Stützpunkt zu geben, dasselbe durch einige verlängerte Fäden an den Aesten dieser Föhren zu befestigen, sonst fürchtet man jeden Augenblick, es durch seine eigene Schwere herabsinken zu sehen� Hierdurch aber knüpft es sich wiederum an die abscheulichste Realität! Nein, grüner Heinrich! nicht also! (12: 222-223) No contemplation can ever be possible, for Erikson in his aesthetic judgment expressly distances himself from objective painting of this kind when he relates positions from the metaphysics of art in European romanticism to Heinrich’s scribble� In the process, he parodies both art and the discourse about art, but nonetheless now explicitly associates the beautiful with the real: Denn was ist das Schöne? Eine reine Idee, dargestellt mit Zweckmäßigkeit, Klarheit, gelungener Absicht! Diese Million Striche und Strichelchen, zart und geistreich oder fest und markig, wie sie sind, in einer Landschaft auf materielle Weise placirt, würden allerdings ein sogenanntes Bild im alten Sinne ausmachen und so der hergebrachten gröbsten Tendenz fröhnen! (12: 222) With biting mockery, finally, Erikson celebrates the absolute abstraction away from anything objective, an abstraction in which there are no differences between art and literature or between artists and dilettantes� He encourages Heinrich to continue his scribbling in like fashion: 442 Frauke Berndt Fort damit! Fange oben in der Ecke an und setze einzeln neben einander Strich für Strich, eine Zeile unter die andere; von Zehn zu Zehn mache durch einen verlängerten Strich eine Unterabtheilung, von Hundert zu Hundert eine wackere Oberabtheilung, von Tausend zu Tausend einen Abschluß durch einen tüchtigen Sparren� Solches Decimalsystem ist vollkommene Zweckmäßigkeit und Logik, das Hinsetzen der einzelnen Striche aber der in vollkommener Tendenzfreiheit in reinem Dasein sich ergehende Fleiß� Zugleich wird dadurch ein höherer Zweck erreicht� […] Wer kann ermessen, wie nahe die Zeit ist, wo auch die Dichtung die zu schweren Wortzeilen wegwirft, zu jenem Decimalsystem der leichtbeschwingten Striche greift und mit der bildenden Kunst in Einer äußeren Form sich vermählt? (12: 223-224) This passage leads one to ask whether Heinrich’s drawing anticipates abstract art, which triumphed over every form of realism at the beginning of the twentieth century (Stelzer 54-58; Andermatt 32-33; Müller 320)� In my view, however, the drawing draws attention instead to the “Faser” (12: 255) and “Textur der Wirklichkeit” (12: 255-256) - as the novel puts it - the “Textur der Dinge” (12: 256): no objects, no colors, in short no mimesis� The beauty - parody or not - of Heinrich’s abstract art lies in the random strokes as such� As I have claimed above, the ontological structure of the world realized in the novel becomes manifest in this scribble, too, because proliferating vegetation passes its structure on to art� This connection between “beautiful grass” and “beautiful strokes” is further reinforced by the fact that a blade of grass and stroke of the pen have the same form, are similar to each other� The “Million Striche und Strichelchen” of Heinrich’s creation in their diversity, “zart und geistreich oder fest und markig” (12: 222), that is to say, are like countless individual blades of grass in their beauty as painted by Bellini and Dürer or described by Brockes and Goethe� In conclusion, the analysis of these two examples from Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich has shown how details of vegetation in narrative fiction, particularly grass, could be made productive in a theory of structural realism� Whereas Brockes binds the abundance of creation to the perceptual perspective of the subject and thus places it against the backdrop of contemporary aesthetics, abundance in Keller’s novel is the abundance of the world realized in the novel� I am of the belief that it is precisely this shift from the subject of perception to the world that constitutes the “realistic” in structural realism� The metaphysical turn in the realism question goes hand-in-hand with this shift� This does not, however, mean that the literature of realism objectively reproduces reality - quite the opposite� The “structural” in structural realism lies in the fact that what becomes manifest both in the concrete “green places” or the abstract scribble is the ontological structure of that particular world realized in narrative fiction - and this Grass: Gottfried Keller’s Structural Realism 443 world is never the reality that surrounds the author in question� In structural realism, this ontological structure is characterized by the tension between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real� The real here is meaningless� It is the bare material out of which the imaginary has the potential to unfold and, in the symbolic, stabilize� I have also drawn out the fact that the imaginary plays a less prominent role in the triad than has previously been assumed� Following the example of Kammer and Krauthausen, therefore, I too deploy the concept of structural realism against a naive concept of mimesis according to which realism in nineteenth-century literature reproduces reality� Instead, the two examples prove the need to consider the means of representation that generate such “reality effects”� Yet I am of the opinion that the conclusion drawn for the past fifty years - that world is an effect of representation, one on which, in a recursive loop, the perception of reality as reality depends - is not the last word on the matter� For the two examples show, too, that Keller’s structural realism involves neither the reproduction of reality nor reality effects in representations, but rather the ontological structure of the world realized in the novel� As the concept of Wirrsal is emphasized in this ontological structure, Lacan’s triad presented itself as a means for perspectivizing it� Realism’s real is thus this Lacanian real� As something real, Wirrsal inhibits both imagination and symbolic order; it proliferates wildly on graves and gardens or emerges by chance from trying out a pen� For this reason, of course, the real cannot be represented directly; instead, it has to be mediated by the two vanitas allegories� Both are, seen in this way, symbols of the real� It is precisely this becoming-manifest, meaning that structural realism in nineteenth-century literature always has a form, that I am concerned with� Thus it is the real that is beautiful, even if it is incomprehensible, unthinkable, impossible, and above all unsayable� Wirrsal does not follow the laws of logic; instead, the laws of aesthetics apply, assuming that a metaphysical dimension of chaos is involved in the real� By chaos, I mean not absolute chaos but rather an unstable order� Although its forms become manifest, they can then dissolve again because they are not lastingly invested with fixed meaning� The ontological structure and its manifestation in form is what I understand by structural realism� Translated by Alastair Matthews and Anthony Mahler 444 Frauke Berndt Notes 1 See the preface to this issue� In the theoretical overview, I pick up some threads of the introduction I wrote with Cornelia Pierstorff for the “Realismus/ Realism” issue of Figurationen 20�1 (2019)� 2 In two essays on Wilhelm Raabe’s prose from 2019 (“Schwelle”) and 2020 (“Worldmaking”), Cornelia Pierstorff undertakes remarkable efforts reintegrating ontology and narratology� 3 Trans� by Alastair Matthews� 4 Trans� by Alastair Matthews� 5 I first outlined this understanding of realism in my essay on Jana Harper’s book art (Berndt, “On Eggs”)� 6 “Gras�” Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm (DWB)� Vol� 8� Col� 1898 (emphasis in original)� 7 Trans� by Alastair Matthews� 8 Trans� by Alastair Matthews� 9 Trans� by Alastair Matthews� 10 In their introduction to Die Wirklichkeit des Realismus (2018), Veronika Thanner, Joseph Vogl, and Dorothea Walzer refer to this important connection between realism and the Lacanian real� 11 Trans� by Alastair Matthews� 12 In his Zurich Lecture on Medieval Philology, Niklaus Largier referred to this painting and inspired me with his interpretation, which was published in 2018 as Spekulative Sinnlichkeit. Kontemplation und Spekulation im Mittelalter; see especially pages 26-27 and 76� 13 See the article by Sebastian Meixner on Gustav Freytag’s novel Soll und Haben in this issue� 14 Among others, the recent approaches of Andrea Krauss (“Nuancen”) and Johannes Hees (“Denken und Betrachten”) in 2018 are very fruitful in this respect� 15 See the realism theory of Moritz Baßler, outlined in the introduction to this issue� 16 See the article by Dorothea von Mücke on Keller’s novella in this issue� 17 Der grüne Heinrich is cited parenthetically by volume and page number from the following edition: Keller, Gottfried� Sämtliche Werke (HKKA)� Vols� 11-12� 18 Amongst others, I have worked on female figures in Der grüne Heinrich (see Anamnesis 231-265), as did Sabine Schneider in an overview (“Ikonen der Liebe”)� Grass: Gottfried Keller’s Structural Realism 445 19 Among others, Ursula Amrein elaborated this topic in essays from 2006 (“Dialektik”) and 2008 (“Todesfiguren”)� 20 In 2012, Stephan Kammer gave a fascinating talk on Friedrich Hölderlin’s Homburger Folioheft in Tübingen, refering to the “Federproben,” which I remembered writing this essay� 21 “gramselig�” Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm (=DWB). 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Vol� 3�2�5� Stuttgart: Verlagsbuchhandlung Carl Mäcken, 1857� Figures Fig� 1� Giovanni Bellini: St. Francis in the Desert (1480) © The Frick Collection, New York� Fig� 2� Albrecht Dürer: The Great Piece of Turf (1503) © The Albertina Museum, Vienna� Fig� 3� David Bailly: Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols (1651) © Museum de Lakenhal, Leiden� Fig� 4� Thomas van Apshoven: Art Studio with the Painter David Teniers (1651) © Kunstmuseum St� Gallen� Donation of the Chappuis-Speiser family 1995�